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> Chairman Mao: (Gestures with his hand and points to his books.) But if the Soviet Union would throw its bombs and kill all those over 30 who are Chinese, that
by bullen 3y ago
> Chairman Mao: (Gestures with his hand and points to his books.) But if the Soviet Union would throw its bombs and kill all those over 30 who are Chinese, that would solve the problem for us. Because the old people like me can’t learn Chinese. We read Chinese. The majority of my books are Chinese. There are very few dictionaries over there. All the other books are in Chinese.
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- H8crilA 3y agoMao is responsible for spreading Mandarin over all the provinces. He himself spoke with such a bad accent that towards the end of his life there was only one person that could understand him, his secretary or nurse or someone like this. Joke says that she was running China for a while since no one could verify her translation. Also, I am guessing a lot of people were still illiterate at the time.
- bullen 3y agoAha, gotcha. Still awkward joke.
- hutzlibu 3y agoOnly partly.
- H8crilA 3y agoNot really. He just meant that old people find it hard to learn to speak Mandarin, even if they can read the Chinese script (which is the same for all Chinese languages). He likely saw this as a major obstacle to his vision of a grand, unified China. He's also responsible for the simplified Chinese script, which was introduced everywhere but in Hong Kong and Taiwan. They are still very mutually intelligible, from what I understand. I mean the part about actually bombing people is of course a joke, I think even such an exceptional psychopath-stateman like him wouldn't do it.
- WeylandYutani 3y agoThat's the dilemma with the CCP. They are a murderous regime but they also made China into a powerful centralised state that can meet as equals with any Western country. They've always been the real nationalists.
- H8crilA 3y agoChina has been a unified empire before Europeans traded seashells with each other (I'm exaggerating here a bit). It is about 10 times older than the United States or Russia in its current post-mongolian iteration. China being weak was unusual in the history of civilizations. While I am firmly in the western camp, not recognizing reality is foolish.
- peterfirefly 3y agoExaggerating a lot. The first unified empire (Qin dynasty) is comparable to Alexander the Great's empire and didn't last much longer. China being weak is also remarkably common -- but there often wasn't a strong enough nearby power to exploit the situation.
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- hguant 3y agoJust to touch on this - Cantonese is not really mutually intelligible with modern Chinese, that's CCP propaganda. They're big on the idea that there's only one Chinese language, and there are "regional dialects" but...those dialects meet an awful lot of criteria for being a different language. It's very similar to their push to make all Chinese culture and history Han Chinese. The mandarin spoken in Taiwan is 1:1 with that in Beijing (minus the accent) but the characters for the language are radically different, to the point where someone knowing simplified Chinese is essentially illiterate in Taipei and vice versa.
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- cronix 3y ago> towards the end of his life there was only one person that could understand him, his secretary or nurse or someone like this > Mao had been in poor health for several years and had declined visibly for at least six months prior to his death. There are unconfirmed reports that he possibly had ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease.[1] [1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong
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